Letters

⁵ Of one position which he strives to maintain I hardly know whether it calls for my tears or my laughter. This wonderful doctor presumes to teach that the devil will once more be what he at one time was, that he will return to his former dignity and rise again to the kingdom of heaven. Oh horror! That a man should be so frantic and foolish as to hold that John the Baptist, Peter, the apostle and evangelist John, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the rest of the prophets, are made co-heirs of the devil in the kingdom of heaven!

I pass over his idle explanation of the coats of skins, and say nothing of the efforts and arguments he has used to induce us to believe that these coats of skins represent human bodies. Among many other things, he says this: “Was God a tanner or a saddler, that He should prepare the hides of animals, and should stitch from them coats of skins for Adam and Eve?” “It is clear,” he goes on, “that he is speaking of human bodies.” If this is so, how is it that before the coats of skins, and the disobedience, and the fall from paradise, Adam speaks not in an allegory, but literally, thus: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;” or what is the ground of the divine narrative, “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman” for him?

Or what bodies can Adam and Eve have covered with fig-leaves after eating of the forbidden tree? Who can patiently listen to the perilous arguments of Origen when he denies the resurrection of this flesh, as he most clearly does in his book of explanations of the first psalm and in many other places? Or who can tolerate him when he gives us a paradise in the third heaven, and transfers that which the Scripture mentions from earth to the heavenly places, and when he explains allegorically all the trees which are mentioned in Genesis, saying in effect that the trees are angelic potencies, a sense which the true drift of the passage does not admit?

For the divine Scripture has not said, “God put down Adam and Eve upon the earth,” but “He drove them out of the paradise, and made them dwell over against the paradise.” He does not say “under the paradise.” “He placed...cherubims and a flaming sword...to keep the way of the tree of life.” He says nothing about an ascent to it. “And a river went out of Eden.” He does not say “went down from Eden.” “It was parted and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison...and the name of the second is Gihon.” I myself have seen the waters of Gihon, have seen them with my bodily eyes.

It is this Gihon to which Jeremiah points when he says, “What have you to do in the way of Egypt to drink the muddy water of Gihon?” I have drunk also from the great river Euphrates, not spiritual but actual water, such as you can touch with your hand and imbibe with your mouth. But where there are rivers which admit of being seen and of being drunk, it follows that there also there will be fig-trees and other trees; and it is of these that the Lord says, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.” They are like other trees and timber, just as the rivers are like other rivers and waters.

But if the water is visible and real, then the fig-tree and the rest of the timber must be real also, and Adam and Eve must have been originally formed with real and not phantasmal bodies, and not, as Origen would have us believe, have afterwards received them on account of their sin. But, you say, “we read that Saint Paul was caught up to the third heaven, into paradise.” You explain the words rightly: “When he mentions the third heaven, and then adds the word paradise, he shows that heaven is in one place and paradise in another.”

Must not every one reject and despise such special pleading as that by which Origen says of the waters that are above the firmament that they are not waters, but heroic beings of angelic power, and again of the waters that are over the earth— that is, below the firmament— that they are potencies of the contrary sort— that is, demons? If so, why do we read in the account of the deluge that the windows of heaven were opened, and that the waters of the deluge prevailed? In consequence of which the fountains of the deep were opened, and the whole earth was covered with the waters.